The Road to Enlightenment

Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of over-priced hard covered math books with twelve editions of each already out of print, still plagued by a plethora of errors, and made in a way where instructors have to modify how they teach to try and compliment the book.

Pharmaceutical Calculations has been designed to make that a problem of the past! Finally a book that can free students and instructors of the tyrany of traditional publishers, and put the instructors back in control.

You are invited to take part in this journey of enlightenment, whether you are a student, an instructor, a pharmicist, a technician, or even just an interested party.

So What is This About?

There is clearly a need for a better and more affordable math book. The purpose of this project is to achieve just that. Pharmaceutical Calculations has been developed in such a way as to try and accomplish this goal by publishing it as an open source text book.

By creating a textbook based on the open source model it allows instructors to modify the book so that it meets their needs, with the only requirement being that they share their changes to help benefit other instructors and students.

Participation

Everyone is invited to participate. Maybe you really like aliquots and have great ideas on how to improve the chapter on that, or you're a LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org guru and know how to improve the layout of the book, or you're on intimate terms with the GIMP and can improve the artwork in the book.

Pharmaceutical Calculations is licensed under the GPL, meaning you are free to make any modifications to the book in any way you wish. Your help can make this the best pharmacy math book ever.

Download the modifiable ODT files to work on (you will need to unpack a compressed file) or the nonmodifiable PDF file simply to check out how the book looks. Once you have completed your modifications email me at sean 'AT' PharmaceuticalCalculations 'DOT' org and also give an explantion of what things you've modified and how you want your name spelled when I list credits for whom made contributions to this book.

Benefits

Why participate? For recognition, inspiration, and a resource we can all refer to when making the case for the open source model when it comes to open source books. This is sorely needed. By doing this today, we can create a better precedence for other textbooks to go this route in the future.

Requirements

The technical requirements are fairly simple. You'll need either OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice (either of which can be downloaded for free) along with the Red Hat Liberation Fonts (these fonts are being used so that no one needs to worry about proprietary fonts).

The legal requirements are spelled out by the license that has been chosen for this book. This book is licensed under the GPL version 3.0 or later. If you don't feel like reading the legalese, the short of it is that you are free to download the book, share the book, and even modify the book, but if you choose to redistribute the book after you've modified it, you need to make your modifications available to others and they have the right as to whether or not they want to incorporate your modifications.

We also ask that you submit only original or open source artwork along with any modifications you make. Please respect copyright laws.